scholarly journals Identifying Corporate Sustainability Issues by Analyzing Shareholder Resolutions: A Machine-Learning Text Analytics Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 4753
Author(s):  
Viju Raghupathi ◽  
Jie Ren ◽  
Wullianallur Raghupathi
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Corporate Sustainability ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Text Analytics ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Word Cloud ◽  
Textual Data ◽  
Shareholder Resolution ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Insight Into

Corporations have embraced the idea of corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) under the general framework of sustainability. Studies have measured and analyzed the impact of internal sustainability efforts on the performance of individual companies, policies, and projects. This exploratory study attempts to extract useful insight from shareholder sustainability resolutions using machine learning-based text analytics. Prior research has studied corporate sustainability disclosures from public reports. By studying shareholder resolutions, we gain insight into the shareholders’ perspectives and objectives. The primary source for this study is the Ceres sustainability shareholder resolution database, with 1737 records spanning 2009–2019. The study utilizes a combination of text analytic approaches (i.e., word cloud, co-occurrence, row-similarities, clustering, classification, etc.) to extract insights. These are novel methods of transforming textual data into useful knowledge about corporate sustainability endeavors. This study demonstrates that stakeholders, such as shareholders, can influence corporate sustainability via resolutions. The incorporation of text analytic techniques offers insight to researchers who study vast collections of unstructured bodies of text, improving the understanding of shareholder resolutions and reaching a wider audience.

Learning and Explaining the Impact of Enterprises’ Organizational Quality on their Economic Results

2012 ◽  
pp. 228-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Pregeljc ◽  
Erik Štrumbelj ◽  
Miran Mihelcic ◽  
Igor Kononenko
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Economic Interpretation ◽  
Organizational Quality ◽  
Social Units ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
General Explanation

The authors employed traditional and novel machine learning to improve insight into the connections between the quality of an organization of enterprises as a type of formal social units and the results of enterprises’ performance in this chapter. The analyzed data set contains 72 Slovenian enterprises’ economic results across four years and indicators of their organizational quality. The authors hypothesize that a causal relationship exists between the latter and the former. In the first part of a two-part process, they use several classification algorithms to study these relationships and to evaluate how accurately they predict the target economic results. However, the most successful models were often very complex and difficult to interpret, especially for non-technical users. Therefore, in the second part, the authors take advantage of a novel general explanation method that can be used to explain the influence of individual features on the model’s prediction. Results show that traditional machine-learning approaches are successful at modeling the dependency relationship. Furthermore, the explanation of the influence of the input features on the predicted economic results provides insights that have a meaningful economic interpretation.

Forecasting US movies box office performances in Turkey using machine learning algorithms

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 6579-6590
Author(s):  
Sandy Çağlıyor ◽  
Başar Öztayşi ◽  
Selime Sezgin
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Learning Algorithms ◽  
Forecast Model ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Gradient Boosting ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Industry Forecast ◽  
The Impact

The motion picture industry is one of the largest industries worldwide and has significant importance in the global economy. Considering the high stakes and high risks in the industry, forecast models and decision support systems are gaining importance. Several attempts have been made to estimate the theatrical performance of a movie before or at the early stages of its release. Nevertheless, these models are mostly used for predicting domestic performances and the industry still struggles to predict box office performances in overseas markets. In this study, the aim is to design a forecast model using different machine learning algorithms to estimate the theatrical success of US movies in Turkey. From various sources, a dataset of 1559 movies is constructed. Firstly, independent variables are grouped as pre-release, distributor type, and international distribution based on their characteristic. The number of attendances is discretized into three classes. Four popular machine learning algorithms, artificial neural networks, decision tree regression and gradient boosting tree and random forest are employed, and the impact of each group is observed by compared by the performance models. Then the number of target classes is increased into five and eight and results are compared with the previously developed models in the literature.

The Doctor Faustus Dossier

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Daub
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Doctor Faustus ◽  
Public Lives ◽  
Nazi Era ◽  
The Impact

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.

Toxic Political Leadership and the Problems of Professionals in Free State Municipalities

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Matheakuena Mohale
Keyword(s):  
Good Governance ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Free State ◽  
Audit Report ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Auditor General ◽  
Appointed Officials ◽  
The Impact

The 2016–17 Audit Report by the Auditor General points to the deterioration in audit results of South African municipalities. This deterioration confirms the perennial dysfunctionality of municipalities, at least from the governance perspective. Corporate governance is a function of leadership. Municipal councils are, therefore, responsible for the overall performance of municipalities they lead. Sound regulatory framework, good plans, clear strategies, policies, and systems are inadequate if not supported by highly gifted and ethical leadership. The Auditor General’s Audit Report suggests that local government struggles the most in the area of ethics. The Principal-Agent Theory argues that appointed officials are more likely to subvert the interests of an organisation. However, this article argues that the primary source of problems in municipalities is a combination of ineptitude and unethical political leadership taking root. This conclusion is based on the empirical comparative cases of eight municipalities in the Free State Province.  The conduct of councillors makes it difficult to attract and retain professionals in municipalities, resulting in notable deficiencies in the delivery of services. Essentially, councillors are the root cause for governance failure in municipalities arising from a number of factors. Findings in this study contribute towards the understanding of the impact of leadership in the failure of municipalities to meet good governance and developmental objectives. Further, they deepen the theoretical understanding of the political-administrative interface.

scholarly journals Changing landscapes: Gay men in the west and northwest of Ireland

Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136346072098169
Author(s):  
Aidan McKearney
Keyword(s):  
Gay Men ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Lgbt People ◽  
The Many ◽  
Northwest Region ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Insight Into

This article focuses on the experiences of gay men in the rural west and northwest region of Ireland, during a period of transformational social and political change in Irish society. These changes have helped facilitate new forms of LGBTQI visibility, and local radicalism in the region. Same-sex weddings, establishment of rural LGBT groups and marching under an LGBT banner at St Patricks Day parades would have been unthinkable in the recent past; but they are now becoming a reality. The men report continuing challenges in their lives as gay men in the nonmetropolitan space, but the emergence of new visibility, voice and cultural acceptance of LGBT people is helping change their lived experiences. The study demonstrates the impact of local activist LGBT citizens. Through their testimonies we can gain an insight into the many, varied and interwoven factors that have interplayed to create the conditions necessary for the men to: increasingly define themselves as gay to greater numbers of people in their localities; to embrace greater visibility and eschew strategies of silence; and aspire to a host of legal, political, cultural and social rights including same-sex marriage. Organic forms of visibility and local radicalism have emerged in the region and through an analysis of their testimonies we can see how the men continue to be transformed by an ever-changing landscape.

Double, triple or quadruple hits? Exploring the impact of cybercrime on victims in the Netherlands

2021 ◽  
pp. 026975802110106
Author(s):  
Raoul Notté ◽  
E.R. Leukfeldt ◽  
Marijke Malsch
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Victim Blaming ◽  
High Prevalence ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Insight Into

This article explores the impact of online crime victimisation. A literature review and 41 interviews – 19 with victims and 22 with experts – were carried out to gain insight into this. The interviews show that most impacts of online offences correspond to the impacts of traditional offline offences. There are also differences with offline crime victimisation. Several forms of impact seem to be specific to victims of online crime: the substantial scale and visibility of victimhood, victimisation that does not stop in time, the interwovenness of online and offline, and victim blaming. Victims suffer from double, triple or even quadruple hits; it is the accumulation of different types of impact, enforced by the limitlessness in time and space, which makes online crime victimisation so extremely invasive. Furthermore, the characteristics of online crime victimisation greatly complicate the fight against and prevention of online crime. Finally, the high prevalence of cybercrime victimisation combined with the severe impact of these crimes seems contradictory with public opinion – and associated moral judgments – on victims. Further research into the dominant public discourse on victimisation and how this affects the functioning of the police and victim support would be valuable.

PODC 2020 Review

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 75-81
Author(s):  
Ahad Mirza Baig ◽  
Alkida Balliu ◽  
Peter Davies ◽  
Michal Dory
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Distributed Computing ◽  
Keynote Speaker ◽  
Lively Discussion ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
New Directions ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Distributed Machine Learning

Rachid Guerraoui was the rst keynote speaker, and he got things o to a great start by discussing the broad relevance of the research done in our community relative to both industry and academia. He rst argued that, in some sense, the fact that distributed computing is so pervasive nowadays could end up sti ing progress in our community by inducing people to work on marginal problems, and becoming isolated. His rst suggestion was to try to understand and incorporate new ideas coming from applied elds into our research, and argued that this has been historically very successful. He illustrated this point via the distributed payment problem, which appears in the context of blockchains, in particular Bitcoin, but then turned out to be very theoretically interesting; furthermore, the theoretical understanding of the problem inspired new practical protocols. He then went further to discuss new directions in distributed computing, such as the COVID tracing problem, and new challenges in Byzantine-resilient distributed machine learning. Another source of innovation Rachid suggested was hardware innovations, which he illustrated with work studying the impact of RDMA-based primitives on fundamental problems in distributed computing. The talk concluded with a very lively discussion.

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